Cyclone Winston: Southern Hemisphere's Strongest Storm Hits Fiji

The Guardian - Nadia Khomami

Five people reported killed, power and communications cut, and remote villages feared to be heavily damaged as country begins cleaning up

Strong winds and heavy rain as Cyclone Winston hits Fiji

At least five people were killed and remote villages were feared to have sustained heavy damage after what was described as the strongest tropical cyclone in Fiji's history.
Fijians, tourists and aid workers were beginning the clean-up on Sunday after category five Cyclone Winston battered the South Pacific nation with wind gusts as strong as 325km/h and waves up to 12m high.

Trees blow in the heavy wind ahead of cyclone Winston's landfall onSaturday in Suva, Fiji. Photograph: Unicef via Getty Images

George Dregaso, a shift leader at Fiji's National Disaster Management Office, said on Sunday that two people on Ovalau Island died when the house they were sheltering in collapsed on them. Another man died on Koro Island and police were investigating reports of two more deaths on the main island of Viti Levu.
About 80% of the nation's 900,000 people were without regular power, although a third of those were able to use generators. Telephone landlines were down but most mobile networks were working.
Dregaso said 483 people had evacuated from their homes and were staying in 32 emergency shelters.
Authorities were urging people to remain indoors as they cleared fallen trees and power lines. They said all schools would be closed for a week to allow time for the cleanup.
A nationwide curfew was extended through Sunday and the government declared a 30-day state of natural disaster, giving extra powers to police to arrest people without a warrant in the interest of public safety.
Australian Red Cross aid worker Susan Slattery said from Suva: "Things will become much clearer over the next 24 hours and our first priority is to make sure people are safe and have the short-term assistance they need."
"At the moment we're focused on removing fallen power lines and trees to make sure it's safe for people to move around … then it's moving into finding out whether we need shelter and clean water, and what food and hygiene items are required to keep people healthy," Slattery said.
All flights in and out of Fiji remained cancelled on Sunday.
Authorities said that as well as the elderly man killed on Koro, there were fears for other people living on the island, north-east of Suva.
"Some villages have reported that all homes have been destroyed," Jone Tuiipelehaki of the United Nations Development Programme tweeted late on Saturday. "Fifty homes have been reported destroyed in the Navaga village in Koro Island."
Australia's foreign minister, Julie Bishop, offered Fiji assistance, including an Australian defence force P-3 Orion to carry out aerial surveillance of the outer islands.

Scenes of Cyclone Winston's destruction in Ba, Fiji. Photograph: Naziah Ali/EPA

About 1,300 Australians are registered as being in Fiji but that figure was likely to be far greater given up to 350,000 visited Fiji every year, Bishop said on Sunday.
Cyclone Winston began to make landfall on the main island of Vitu Levu after a national curfew took effect at 6pm local time on Saturday. It had earlier sunk boats and caused flash flooding on the nation's outer islands, including Vanua Levu.
The country's prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, said on Saturday that the government was prepared to deal with a potential crisis.
"As a nation we are facing an ordeal of the most grievous kind," he wrote. "We must stick together as a people and look after each other."

Damage from Cyclone Winston in the town of Ba on Fiji's Viti Levu island. Photograph: STRINGER/Reuters

Save the Children Fiji's chief executive, Iris Low-McKenzie, said: "We're extremely concerned about the impact this will have on children, who are particularly vulnerable during emergencies."
Airlines operating in the region including Virgin Australia, Jetstar, Qantas and Fiji Airways all reported cancelled flights or altered timetables, with passengers told to consult their carrier for information.

Links

• Fiji becomes first country in the world to ratify Paris agreement 
• Fiji PM decries Australia's 'climate change deniers' in Turnbull cabinet

Climate Change Politics Is Blinding Us To The Devastating Effects Of Dirty Air

The Guardian - John Vidal

Governments are failing to address the links between air pollution and global warming. Doing so would save countless lives globally

A rickshaw puller on a polluted a street in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photograph: Zakir Hossain Chowdhury/Barcro

It is the greatest environmental hazard of the age. Nothing focuses our concern for the future more, divides rich and poor, exercises science, business, politicians, old and young. It is an existential threat, a generational battle. All political and financial resources must be concentrated on stopping climate change.
But now that governments have signed up to the unambitious Paris climate agreement and pledged to try to limit greenhouse gas emissions, we must ask whether we have lost sight of everything else. Is the environment just about carbon and parts per million of gases in the atmosphere? What about the environment that we can smell, see and touch today?
For 20 years or more concerns about nuclear waste, food production, the quality of river water, the health of our soils and seas, the fate of our forests, the impact of road-building and many other important ecological issues have been steadily marginalised, starved of resources or pushed off the agenda by climate change.
Climate has become for government an excuse to build nuclear power and ditch other green policies. Money for biodiversity has been slashed, planning laws revoked, pollution and waste controls weakened and sustainable development policies rejected. Most popular and ministerial attention has been focused on energy companies and big carbon polluters, and the wider environment has visibly deteriorated. Seeing trees as sticks of carbon, air as gas, or forests as sinks is abstract, esoteric and emotionally stultifying.
Most heinous of all the sins of emissions is what has happened to our air quality since climate change climbed the political agenda 20 years ago. No government wants us to know that far more people will suffer grievous illnesses and will die from the filthy air shrouding our cities than from any warming of the atmosphere in the next 30 years. Climate change may give us a glimpse of the terrifying future we are heading towards if we don't change our ways, but toxic air is already here, and killing us in ever greater numbers.
New estimates from the Global Burden of Disease project and the World Health Organisation state that between 5.5 and 7 million people die from air pollution every year. That's more than die from malaria and HIV/Aids put together; more than the population of Scotland. In the next 10 years we can expect as many people to die from breathing poisonous air as were killed in the second world war.
Most of those deaths will be in China and India which, in the name of extreme poverty eradication, have been transforming their cities and are now having to pay for a health crisis of their own making. But we in rich countries do not have the same excuses. Our industries and governments have known for well over a century the health effects of polluted air. Yet they have fought in Europe to be allowed to continue polluting, and people have been encouraged to switch to diesel and more polluting fuels because they emit less CO2.

In Britain, 29,000 people die a year from unburned carbon and construction dust, and 23,500 more as a result of nitrogen dioxide.' Photograph: Bazza/Alamy

In Britain, 29,000 people die a year from breathing in particles of unburned carbon and construction dust, and an estimated 23,500 more as a result of nitrogen dioxide. To condone these deaths is unforgivable; to actively seek to carry on polluting is like declaring war on the public. It’s saying, “We know that the whole of Christchurch or half the city of Worcester will be asphyxiated next year, but there is nothing we think we should do about it.”

But those 50,000 or more deaths a year are just the tip of the iceberg, hiding hospital wards full of people with heart disease, cancers and respiratory and lung problems caused by lifetimes spent breathing toxic air. No one counts the heartbreak when parents die young, or when children are unable to breathe properly or when Granny develops dementia – which is now linked to air pollution too.

Nor does government want us to tell us how much air pollution really costs. This is reckoned by the European environment agency to be over £10bn a year in damage to people’s health, buildings, soil and water. That is dozens of new hospitals and schools, thousands of extra nurses and teachers, and enough left over to protect most of Britain’s premier conservation sites.
After 20 years of battling to get government to take the climate seriously, we must wake up to the fact that the very air we breathe is killing us and making us bankrupt, yet governments are deliberately making the situation worse. Despite the Volkswagen scandal – the German car giant admitted that it cheated emissions tests in the US – new pollution limits for diesel cars have been delayed until 2019.
On the drawing board in Britain are a new runway and hundreds of thousands more planes every year in the southeast, a massive national road-building programme, several new road crossings for east London taking air pollution into the heart of some of the poorest areas, the £50bn HS2 rail line, fracking, giant infrastructure projects from nuclear power stations and new ports. All will add to air pollution and to climate emissions.
The government has developed tunnel vision. Because it sees environmental problems as many separate issues, it does not understand the links between them and the benefits of addressing them together. Yet the science shows that if air pollution is addressed, there will be a significant decrease in climate emissions. Restoring peat bogs and investing in conservation will not only improve biodiversity, reduce flooding and make for a healthier environment, it will also reduce greenhouse gases.
We have been distracted by climate change and have let governments dictate the agenda. Now we must return to basics, and address all those issues that have been conveniently dropped. Who will get angry about the degradation of water quality, the plague of plastic in our seas? Mining? What about computer and smart phone waste? Litter? Population control? Endangered species? Unless we address mass consumption – the root of our environmental crisis – climate change will not only worsen, we will be left with a degraded world.

Rather than solely trying to tackle the vast problem of climate change, we must address all the many factors which make it worse. It’s a case of looking after the green pennies and letting the green pounds take care of themselves.

Links

• Scientists: air pollution led to more than 5.5 million premature deaths in 2013
• Air pollution: a dark cloud of filth poisons the world's cities

Climate Change: Kiribati Turns To Artificial Islands To Save Nation From Atlantis Fate

International Business Times - Hannah Osborne

Kiribati slowly being engulfed by rising sea levels Reuters

Kiribati is hoping to build artificial islands in a bid of saving the low-lying nation from rising sea levels that look set to turn it into a modern-day Atlantis. President Anote Tong said they are seeking help from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) engineers to work out how they could feasibly create artificial islands to protect the country from future climate change.
Kiribati has been on the forefront of climate-change discussions for a number of years. Comprised of 33 atolls and reef islands, much of the nation sits just above sea level. It is one of the lowest-lying nations on the planet and climate scientists have identified it as being one of the most at risk from global warming.
It is located roughly in the Pacific Ocean halfway between Hawaii and Australia and has a population of just over 100,000. In 2013, Tong said climate change-induced sea-level rise was inevitable and that islanders would have to migrate to survive. He later said most of the island would be underwater before the end of the 21^st century.

Anote Tong, President of Kiribati Reuters

The idea of the island being slowly sunken led to the first-ever person to claim refugee status as a result of climate change. Ioane Teitiota tried to win refuge in New Zealand because it was becoming too dangerous to live on his home island. According to a case transcript, he told courts: "There's no future for us when we go back to Kiribati, especially for my children. There's nothing for us there."
His case was rejected, however, with the judge saying the claim was "fundamentally misconceived". In the ruling, the judge said that while the court had sympathy with the people of Kiribati, the application could not be accepted.
"Traditionally a refugee is fleeing his own government or a non-state actor from whom the government is unwilling or unable to protect him. Thus the claimant is seeking refuge within the very countries that are allegedly 'persecuting' him." However, it conceded climate change will become an ever-important issue in regards to refugees in the future and must be addressed before lands become inhabitable.

Reuters

In a bid to prevent the country from having to be abandoned, Tong said authorities are looking at artificial islands like the Palm Jumeirah in Dubai as one solution to the problem Kiribati is facing. According to ABC's Pacific Beat, he said: "We really have to look at adaptation strategies beyond mitigation, and we will have to build islands. We recently received a technical team from UAE headed by Dutch engineers with the sole objective of providing Kiribati with technical and credible solutions to our predicament.
"Indeed there is a light at the end of the tunnel. What might have been viewed as something unachievable and impossible may now become the solution not only for Kiribati but all other low-lying atoll islands."
Artificial islands come at a cost, however. Palm Jumeirah cost the UAE $12bn (£8.4bn) and Tong estimates raising Kiribati could cost up to $100m – money that would need to come, at least in part, from international support.

Palm Jumeirah Richard Schneider/CC

Palm Jumeirah alone cost the Emirati government an estimated $US120bn, and Tong estimated raising Kiribati could cost as much as $US100m. Furthermore this would not necessarily be a long-term solution, as sea levels continue to rise. The IPCC projects under a worst-case scenario, sea levels will rise by up to around a metre, however this has been dubbed a conservative estimate by some scientists.
Regardless, the idea of artificial islands as a way to save Kiribati appears to be the best – if only – option at present. A study published in Ocean Engineering last year said an artificial islands is a "feasible solution" if significant international support was provided.
"Transition to an artificial island is a feasible option with significant international support, and would enable survival for the population of South Tarawa with minimum disruption to their current lifestyle," researchers wrote. "Its construction and population would require a large leap of faith by both the financiers and the inhabitants, but it has the potential to provide a range of economic, social and environmental benefits both for the population and for the country."

A proposal for artificial islands to save Kiribati Shimizu Corp

A number of proposals have been put forward, including one by Shimizu Corp, a Tokyo-based construction company, which devised a concept to create a city that floats on lily-pads. "The idea behind the Green Float project was first as a solution to the problem of a rapidly growing human population or as a city that would be immune to earthquakes and tsunami," Masayuki Takeuchi, head of the scheme, told The Telegraph. "But we quickly realised that it could save islands from rising sea levels. We are still at the planning stage, of course, but we believe this is a feasible project."
Nothing has been formally agreed, but Tong said he is planning on Kiribati remaining above water: "If we are really serious about ensuring a secure and safe future for our people, giving up has never been an option," he said.

Links

• Kiribati: World's First 'Climate Change Refugee' Ioane Teitiota Loses New Zealand Asylum Bid
• Kiribati Climate Refugee Seeks Asylum in New Zealand
• Humans to evolve webbed feet because of sea level rise? Maybe, but probably not
• Tangier Island residents to become first US climate change refugees in as little as 25 years
• Burning all Earth's fossil fuels would eliminate Antarctic Ice Sheet and cause 200ft sea level rise